|
Nuit Debout: a new chapter
in European worker’s struggles
It was not so long ago that the hopes of
many socialists were pinned on the struggle in Greece. In the Syriza experiment
it was believed that a left reformist government, in control of the state
apparatus and with the electoral support of the working class, could face
down the European powers and the global financial institutions.
The experiment was a disastrous failure,
underlined by Greece recently receiving over €11 billion in funds,
most of which will go back to the banks as interest payments. In return
the Syriza led government will implement another round of austerity on
an already impoverished working class and oversee a programme of mass privatisation.
In fact there is an old saying among Marxists
that reformists, faced with capitalist crisis, immediately become anti-reformists
who lead the charge against the working class.
That has happened in Greece and also in
France. The Hollande government was supposed to soften the blows of austerity.
Instead it led military adventures abroad and cuts at home, imposed emergency
laws and whipped up hatred of refugees.
It used the Paris attacks to bring in
emergency legislation to restrict democratic rights. Then it proposed employment
laws that would allow employers to slash wages and install a longer working
week. The government added insult to injury by using another emergency
law to bypass parliament.
The immediate response was the rise of
Nuit debout, a youth movement that came out at night and occupied the Place
de la Republic and city centre squares across France. Significant state
violence failed to displace them, and they were joined by the organized
working class in strikes across energy and transport.
The central political fact is that we are
now moving into territory that goes beyond reformism. The reformists tell
the workers and youth that further sacrifices are needed. In response they
are saying that the workers must come first.
The strengths of the new movement is balanced
by weaknesses. The youth are able to organize and mobilize because
they are free of the stultifying hands of social democracy and the
trade union bureaucracy. However they lack political experience and the
level of class consciousness to be found in the workers movement. Some
of the practices of consensus brought forward from the occupy movement
are a barrier to political growth.
The workers, with much higher levels of
discipline and class consciousness, are bound inside the trade union movement.
The French bureaucracy have a history of militant mobilization
followed by deal and demobilisation. Where the youth called for the removal
of the new law, they had called for consultation.
When the deal is struck there will be
great pressure to fragment and demobilise the resistance.
The glue that will tie them together is
political. Capitalism now says that the gains of generations of workers
must be set aside to ensure its survival. The response must be that capitalist
property rights, capitalist interests, must be set aside to ensure that
the interests of the workers prevail.
The organizational form of that resistance
should be a revolutionary party of the working class, able to draw on our
past history, to organize and strike together, to debate and learn from
our actions and to reach beyond the borders of France to mobilize workers
across the continent. |
|